Cello Recycling incarcerates the listener in Netherland’s Rutger Zuydervelt and American multi-instrumentalist Aaron Martin’s penchant for staccato, pointillist constructions, layered together into quaking masses that positively purr with energy. The opening twelve minute composition unfolds like a rolling cloud of harmonics shot through with querulous whines and whimpers. In an almost obsessive manner, it constantly grates against itself, picking at its own scabs, trying to break free of its moorings, to lose its depth of field, and float in a space free of resistance.

Rather than being driven by instinct, though, these storms of percussive detail, deft contortions, and strangled cello tones are all too apparent in their intentions, never achieving a dialectically mediated distance from itself. Even when the ecclesiastic space, slow moving and concerned with nuances of timbre, flows into a door-rattling blizzard of sound, which clicks, gurgles, and growls with subterranean menace, it is all rather contrived, narrow in scope, and ultimately content with an operational state of being. By contrast, the second piece barely moves from a sustained dynamic hush, which evokes a stronger feeling of distance, of separation. Chattering bugs, dripping beads of water snapping against metallic surfaces are all gestural markings of the fact that one is still clearly within the gloom and doom camp. A certain charm does settle in, precisely in the manner in which the (banal) apocalyptic nature of the material and the distant perspective of its mechanical realization exposes a strategical dimension previously hidden in the murk. With only a twenty-minute life-span, little else develops, leaving this effort to stand as an educational step towards hopefully more dynamic exercises in sound.